--- by JLS
------ for the GC
GRICE HAD A PENCHANT FOR generalities. If he saw a swan and a stork he would utter: "Bird!". Similarly, if he saw a piece of reasoning, he utters, loudly, in "Aspects of reason": 'reason!'
Grice thought that there is aequi-vocality of reason. He omits the 'ae' sound and speaks of equivocality. The important thing is the non-plain text: 'equi' has to come out in italics:
equivocality.
What does he mean by it? It took me some time to realise that
'equi' or aequi-
is indeed
=
as when we say
4 = 4
So '4' is aequivocal. Or
4 = 2 + 2
"4" and "2 + 2" are "aequivocal". They are, ultimately, the same, identical, equity-based, 'vox' or voice.
Now, how does this relate to the
equivocality of 'reason'.
At this point Grice surprises us. Instead of sticking with the 'equivocality' of "therefore" which he had analysed to tears in terms of conventional implicature, he approaches "must"
p
---
Therefore, c
In a valid argument, Grice claims, c follows p. P yields c. But not just that: c MUST follow p. P MUST yield c.
So 'must''s the word.
-----
The varieties of 'must' he wants to tackle in terms of his 'equi-vocality' thesis is the Hume-barrier:
"is", not "ought"!
--- No such thing for Grice. For Grice, 'must' is EQUIvocal in theoretical (or as he preferred, 'alethically trapped') argument and in 'practical' argument.
One MUST be loyal to one's wife.
One MUST be of the idea that there is justice in one's country's cause.
These are EXAMPLES by Grice -- meta-illustrations, if you must!
---- There are chronological points to consider. His "Reply to Richards" he wrote in 1984, and came out in 1986. His "Aspects of reason" he delivered in 1977 but came out in 2001. Here is from the Reply then, which postdates the Aspects:
He is considering alethic 'must' and practical 'must' and something like the theoretical 'akrasia'. ("I know what p, and I know that if p, q, and I know that I MUST then know that q, but I REFUSE to know it").
Grice writes:
"In a broadened sense of 'practical', ALL argument is
practical".
i.e.
"In a broadened sense of 'practical', which wold relate not just
to action, but also to the adoption of ANY attitude or stance which
is within our rational control, we might think of ALL argument,
even alethic argument, as practical, perhaps with the practical
tail-piece omitted."
--- So far so good.
Here J's 'bete noire', Inductivism, rears its ugly head. Grice writes:
"Alethic or EVIDENTIAL argument may be thought of
as directing us to accept or believe some
proposition on the grands that it is
certain OR LIKELY to be true."
-----
This may seem, to Grice, and to J, a something weak thing to have -- the 'or likely' bit.
Grice notes:
"BUT, sometimes, we are led to RATIONAL
acceptance of a proposition,"
via inference?
"though perhaps not to BELIEF in it) by
considerations OTHER THAN the likelihood
of its truth."
We need examples!
Here he comes with two apparently harmless ones -- the former, especially, in terms of 'loyalty' and patriotism, respectively.
Are they inferences?
Grice writes:
"Things that are matters of FAITH"
versus argument
"of one sort of another." Here he mentions (a) and (b)
(a) fidelity of one's wife.
(b) the justice of one's country cause
---
"[a and b] are, typically, NOT accepted on
evidential grounds"
--- they are yet not tautological.
Rather they are accepted "as demands imposed by
loyalty [a] or patriotism [b]."
----
Do these combine? Arguing and faith?
Apparently they do. Just hear to the Pope!
Grice writes:
"The ARGUMENTS produced by THOSE WHO WISH us
to have such faith may well not be SILENT
about this fact".
When you add infallibility to the utterer you get the Vatican's implicatures.
----
But back to the 'must'.
A practical arguer may then want to have, as conclusion:
---
"Therefore, be faithful to your wife!"
or
"Therefore, accept the justice of your country's cause!"
--
That would be the extreme case of a practical (not alethic) argument, with a 'matter of faith' conclusion.
On the OTHER extreme is the harmless, by comparison, argument that J finds as beyond the realm of formal deductive logic, rightly. One which has as conclusion something that 'depends' on verosimiliude.
"Likelihood of truth" is a good one. And so is verosimilitude. I never saw it! I mean. The good point about "seeing the truth" is that you see it. But seeing something that looks LIKE the truth? I may just as well see something that looks like Alice!
("Alice" apparently is a corruption of "Aletheia", hence Truth. -- I was going to write the name of a very famous BEAUTIFUL model instead, but Alice came to my rescue. Ah well).
----
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well, that's sort of the problem--the evidentiary argument (ie gathering data, or "backing" in Toulmin's little schema) is quite different than the actual inference, and proof. Often arguments are really more about establishing premises than the deduction (which is usually the difficult sort of puzzle found in college-boy logic texts, sort of perfunctory...ie. can be done by app. as well).
ReplyDeleteOne slightly interesting issue with Toulmin's schema (often read as "mere" rhetoric, when really Toulmin was taking on induction, and the Humean sort of skepticism...) involves the "warrant" construction. How does one establish true premises? (especially the "major" premise, typically conditional..ie the warrant = major premise in ordinary syllogism). All of the sudden logic--at least if one wants to use "truth"-- starts to look like...physics or chemistry, or mere tautologies...or nada
You are VERY right about Toulmin. It is VERY sad, and a bad point about Grice's play group that they would not hear ANYTHING that this man was trying to teach from Leeds!
ReplyDelete--- Poor Toulmin had it bad. When he left Cambridge, Witters complained to Rhees, "Toulmin has just stolen my ideas" or words. He was referring to Toulmin's DPhil for Cantab, later published as "The place of reason in ethics". Toulmin then went to Oxford but stayed for a term or two. Oxford can be VERY cold if you don't have a playgroup or something. He ended up in Leeds. He left Leeds soon enough, too (Ross told publicly that the reason is that he had an affair with a post-doc female). "Uses of argument" is a GEM.
The whole point is indeed to let Logic suffer by comparison!
I did review some of the Oxonian connections when we learned Toulmin had died recently. (Bayne is a good Toulminian). As I recall, his "Uses of Argument" was disparaged by the Oxonians, and Toulmin took that, fairly enough, to his credit! (I think it got reviewed by Strawson and Urmson).
Imagine the situation: Urmson had written a long, discursive thing about 'philosophical analysis' and he was becoming the master of probabilit in Oxford (Toulmin reies on Urmson's "Two senses of "probable""). Strawson was the Master with the capital M with his Introduction to Logical theory, which was started to be giving as textbook in Oxford -- and which was meant as the new Millian System of Logic, compleat with an inductive appendix that many find amusing ("the problem of induction, not a problem").
They could NOT have digested Toulmin back then. And then, it was too late. Toulmin never returned to Oxford, and he found that, hey, if they think it's rhetorics in the USA, let it (be so).
Logic types following Carnap and Quine did not care for Toulmin, apparently (I don't know all about the insider Oxbridge scandals, etc). Toulmin essentially dismissed their work as dry formality, unapplicable, "logic chopping" in the bad sense. Uses of Argument appeared what 1958 or so, so Russell was still alive, and Toulmin was one of ..St. Ludwig's students, wasn't he? And Wittgensteinians were not all beloved (even by Quine, who I think shared Popper's view that Witt. was...a dilettante, if not...meshugginah..etc).
ReplyDeleteThat said, I am not a "Toulminian" but agree that Toulmin has been dumbed down, and mistreated as serious thinker--some rhetoric people might allude to his argument schema, but know little about even the UoA as a whole (like the section on probability, evidence, the points relating warranting to traditional logic, applicability to research/social science etc), and most don't quite get the "macro" or conceptual points that Toulmin, like Wittgenstein hinted at.
(I scribbled something on Toulmin's system a while back...)
Will have a look. Indeed, he was Witters's pupil. Those were some COLD rooms, that Witters held his classes in. He was, of course, Professor of Philosophy -- but apparently he enjoyed slumming in the east Anglian pubs instead (vide Bartley III, for some details of Witters's days at Cambridge). So he should have been grateful that Toulmin was popularising his views. Instead he wrote to friends that he feared Toulmin 'had stolen' his ideas. Ah well.
ReplyDeleteYes, that schema in "Uses of Argument" is pretty good. The scandal was Leeds --. I don't think in Oxford -- or Cambridge for that matter, since you like to use "Oxbridge" so much, :) -- would have cared if he had slept with a post-doc female. There was so few of them!
I enjoyed your piece on Toulmin in "Contingencies". Indeed, cogent vs. sound. I taught Logic for a while. I gave up when after like 5 weeks of going through this expensive textbook that students were of course OBLIGED to buy, I asked a student, in a quiz, to define, "argue" -- and (I loved him -- and must have his name and grade somewhere) he went, "It's when people fight -- but with words".
ReplyDeleteAh well.
At least your student attempted a rough translation. My mathematics college teaching was characterized by "cooking students" so to speak who regarded mathematics as recipes to be memorized for unknown purposes. It became so unnerving that I typically made "flash cards" (index cards with the premise on the front and the conclusion on the back, or the left side of an equation or inequality on the front and the right side on the back, and so on) for students going as far back as elementary arithmetic which many of them were deficient in (the USA mishmash). They wouldn't study the flash cards. I even included translations into roughly ordinary English on cards, and examples, definitions, axioms, postulates, theorems, essences of proofs (not more than 2 typewritten or regular sized handwritten lines per front or back of each card), and we practiced making and studying cards in class, and almost nobody studied their cards or remembered them.
ReplyDeleteApparently, California education in the views of students tends to reduce to principles like: "If it's too complicated, ignore it or complain," and "If it's too simple, it can be left for the day of the examination or one can use illness as an excuse."
Osher Doctorow
Mind. "If it's too simple, it can be left for the day of the examination" IS a good one.
ReplyDeleteI tended (and MAY tend) to ask students to reason -- and surely you won't know that you'll reason -- 'till the day of the examination'. For why waste a good argument otherwise?
But seriously, we should concentrate on 'the teaching side' of this (or that) in a different thread! This is about Russell's Turkey.
ReplyDeleteSurely the turkey who got fed everyday will DISBELIEVE that the feeder is, on Thanksgiving Day (providing he is not the privileged turkey at the White house) going to behead him.
This is the priciple of the Uniformity of Nature, and which lies at the bottom of what makes 'induction' rational. There are OTHER problems, like the secondary principle by which we justify the primary principle of induction. All in all, just because Strawson said that there was no 'problem' ('really', he added, to irritate me) with induction, I tend to think there is: Strawson himself!
This is then Grice on Kneale:
ReplyDelete"It may be, for example, that the
SUBSTANTIAL introduction of
abstract entities,"
-- not merely as a 'way of speaking' --
"like properties, makes possible
the application of what Kneale
called 'secondary induction'
(Probability and Induction, p. 104
for example), the principles at work in
primary induction."
So beware the inductivist like Hacking (a Griceian at heart -- and married to my favourite Gricester: Judith Baker), in "The Emergence of Probability": he may be
a 'secondary inductivist'...